Why founders need hobbies

Echo chamber

When you don’t take a step back, you get caught in the startup echo chamber. Your brain needs a break. Sleep is the most regular forced break your brain gets, but you need it more frequently than that. You need waking hours and days to let your mind organize all the thoughts and process them.

When you’re working 10-15 hour days, 6-7 days a week with no breaks and nothing else to focus on, you lose the forest for the trees. You become incapable of addressing problems efficiently because you never take a step back to get fresh perspective.

Your company will operate less and less efficiently because you’ll make more and more bad decisions.

The solution

So what do you do about that? How do you have a healthy balance of working hard on your company, giving it the attention it, your team and your customers deserve and making efficient, wise decisions while also not running yourself in to the ground?